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Jun 26th 2012 

Healthcare & Technology – Where Does Pharma Fit In?

Even as the Supreme Court continues to debate the legality of the Obama health care law, most specifically the Affordable Care Act’s individual health-insurance mandate, many key initiatives of the plan’s overall intent are here to stay.  Critically, they are already changing the entire healthcare landscape and cannot be ignored.  To ensure a full share of the benefits, Pharma needs to engage with HIT now and fully understand the new landscape unfolding.

Better living through technology

While most other major industries such as music, publishing, and banking have already seen the disruption and reinvention of the digital revolution, healthcare has been characteristically slow to the party.  Fortunately, the HITECH ACT of 2009, designed to promote the adoption and meaningful use of health information technology, has helped to greatly motivate the digitization of healthcare.  

HITECH is the first big push into digitization and it is accomplishing its goals.  Over $6 billion of the $27 billion allocated has been spent to date.  According to recent CDC data there’s been a 33.8% adoption rate for EHRs in NY and over 60% of physicians are using tablets in daily practice (presumably to view EHRs).  And judging by the hundreds, even thousands of presenters, exhibitors, and attendees of eHealth conferences such as HIMSS, Health2.0, and the mHealth Summit, the overall market for HIT is extremely robust.  Until you walk the many miles of the HIMSS exhibits it’s hard to understand the growth of this market.  EHRs are just the tip of the iceberg as entrepreneurs launch new apps and sites while major players like Phillips, Cisco, GE, Dell, and countless others line up to help drive the connected future of healthcare.

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Nov 9th 2011 

Pharma Companies That Have Proved Me Wrong

It takes a big person to admit they’re wrong. This is especially true when it’s me, as I really don’t like doing this. Ever.

Well, here comes one of those rare times where I do admit it. There is one caveat: I’m not totally wrong. Just partially wrong.

You see, almost two and a half years ago I wrote a post called  Ten Digital Marketing Ideas Pharma Companies Will Never Try (But Should). It ‘s actually  the second most read post ever on Dose of Digital (second only to Facebook Pages Just Got Easier for Brands). That means about 8,000 of you will understand why I’m admitting I’m wrong today. In this post, I spelled out, well, 10 digital marketing ideas that I thought pharma companies would never try. Read More…

Oct 6th 2011 

How New Facebook Features Will Impact Healthcare

Update, Oct. 12: if you want to see all of our posts and white papers from the series we did on the recent Facebook changes, you can visit this page.

Like many humans, you’ve probably noticed that Facebook has made some changes recently to its platform. For most people, these changes became apparent with the addition of Lists, a new News Feed structure, and the ticker. All of these changes will impact how people use Facebook and will force brands to rethink how they use the platform as well. I co-authored a point of view paper on all of these changes for my company, Possible Worldwide, and I’ll be discussing many of these over the coming days. I’ll include a link at the end of this post where you can pick up a copy of the full point of view paper. Rest assured that the paper and some upcoming posts will explain why I think brands need to completely rethink their approach to Facebook. The value of a “Like” isn’t what it used to be, so brands will need to find other ways for people to engage with them. I could go on for hours. Check out the paper or stay tuned for some upcoming posts for more details.

For today’s post, I wanted to talk about one really interesting new feature that is part of the Timeline format for profiles that Facebook has announced. If you don’t know what Timeline is, then check out this page that explains it all. I personally think this is one of the best things that Facebook has ever done with the platform. It’s a really aesthetically pleasing interface that serves as a really interesting digital scrapbook of your life. It’s got everything you’ve ever put on Facebook in an organized, time-based format and it looks great.
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Sep 14th 2011 

Pick Two — Healthcare Digital Marketing Challenge

You can’t have it all in life. You certainly can’t have it all when it comes to your digital marketing. It all comes down to choices. If you want one thing, you might have to sacrifice another. Oftentimes, this is because these choices seem to be mutually exclusive. A perfect example of this is illustrated in the triangle above (often referred to as the “Project Triangle“). For any given project, you can have any of the two characteristics seen at the points of the triangle, but you can’t get all three. For example, if you want it good and you need it fast, then expect for it to cost more because you’ll need to pay for additional help. You can have something fast and it can be cheap, but don’t expect it to be good.

These Pick Two triangles have become a bit of a meme on the Internet popping up in multiple places often with pretty humorous choices (I find myself on reddit to kill time fairly often). So, I thought I’d use this concept to illustrate some of the challenges I see today in healthcare digital marketing. More importantly, I’d like to bring us all a dose of reality when it comes to our marketing efforts. You can’t have it all. Frequently, that’s what companies want and what clients demand. So, consider this post a little reminder of what’s possible in most cases. Sure…sometimes it’s possible to have all three, but I don’t see it very often. Maybe that’s because it’s impossible or because there isn’t enough innovative thinking being applied to the problem (hint: consider looking outside of pharma sometimes). You be the judge.
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